Workers are ghosting their employers like bad dates

Economists report that workers are starting to act like millennials on Tinder: They’re ditching jobs with nary a text.

“A number of contacts said that they had been ‘ghosted,’ a situation in which a worker stops coming to work without notice and then is impossible to contact,” the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago noted in December’s Beige Book, which tracks employment trends.

National data on economic “ghosting” is lacking. The term, which usually applies to dating, first surfaced in 2016 on Dictionary.com. But companies across the country say silent exits are on the rise.

Analysts blame America’s increasingly tight labor market. Job openings have surpassed the number of seekers for eight straight months, and the unemployment rate has clung to a 49-year low of 3.7 percent since September.

Janitors, baristas, welders, accountants, engineers — they’re all in demand, said Michael Hicks, a labor economist at Ball State University in Indiana. More people may opt to skip tough conversations and slide right into the next thing.

“Why hassle with a boss and a bunch of out-processing,” he said, “when literally everyone has been hiring?”

Keith Station, director of business relations at Heartland Workforce Solutions, which connects job hunters with companies in Omaha, said service workers in his area are most likely to skip out on low-paying service positions.

“People just fall off the face of the Earth,” he said of the area, which has an especially low unemployment rate of 2.8 percent.

Some Nebraska employers are trying to avoid unfilled shifts with apprentice programs that guarantee raises and additional training over time.

“Then you want to stay and watch your wage grow,” Station said.

Other recruitment businesses point to solutions from China, where ghosting took off during the past decade’s explosive growth.

“We generally make two offers for every job because somebody doesn’t show up,” said Rebecca Henderson, chief executive of Randstad Sourceright, a talent acquisition firm.

And if both hires stick around, she said, her multinational clients are happy to deepen the bench.

While ghosting in the United States does not yet require that level of backup planning, consultants urge employers to build meaningful relationships at every stage of the hiring process.

Someone who feels invested in an enterprise is less likely to bounce, write Melissa and Johnathan Nightingale, co-authors of “How F*cked Up Is Your Management?: An uncomfortable conversation about modern leadership.”

“Employees leave jobs that suck,” they said in an email. “Jobs where they’re abused. Jobs where they don’t care about the work. And the less engaged they are, the less need they feel to give their bosses any warning.”

Zach Keel, a 26-year-old server in Austin, made the call last year to flee a Texas bar-slash-cinema after realizing he would have to clean the place until sunrise. More work, he calculated, was always around the corner.

“I didn’t call,” Keel said. “I didn’t show up. I figured: No point in feeling guilty about something that wasn’t that big of an issue. Turnover is so high, anyway."

Comments

Danielle PaquetteDanielle Paquette is a reporter focusing on national labor issues. Before joining The Washington Post in 2014, she covered crime for the Tampa Bay Times in St. Petersburg, Fla. Follow